230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system
theregister.com
theregister.com
It's not a simple conversion because it's not a common conversion. It's like converting between inches and meters. The imperial system is multiple systems smashed together, and it's optimized for the more common conversions.
Not saying it's a perfect system, or that metric isn't better, but it's absolutely useable. I'd much rather stick with imperial than half-ass a conversion to metric and be stuck between the two systems, like what's happened in Canada and the UK.
who actually seriously uses decimeter on a weekly basis and what for?
I've used metric for 50+ years and I'm in the field of sensors and measurement with application from remote sensing to minerals and energy .. and I've yet to use a decimeter unit (outside of a programming exercise).
The convential usage is pico, nano, milli, centi, and full metre (and upwards to kilo, etc).
I mean, who uses feet anymore anyway?
I've just measured up a whole bunch of stuff making a parrot proof covering for a pear tree .. everything is jotted on the back side of a bit of board in mm (millimeters).
3230 mm is 3.2 metres and a bit .. a bit under 10 & a half feet (but, again, who even uses feet or thinks in them anyway? *)
* We do use yards for conveying to USAians what distance we shoot targets at on the farm; (eg from the next door neighbours youtube channel [1] 5023 yards 24" x 24" target ULR shooting)
But doing things at yard scale in mm is not helping the cause. Who wants to be throwing around 4 digit numbers in their head?
Millimeter fit on cabinets is the fit you want, whether you work in metric, British Imperial, or US Common.
When you have a long kitchen counter you're looking at 3 metres or more ( ~10 ft ) with framing and doors that join with barely the width a fingernail between.
The measurements are 10 foot (two digits), 6 inches, (another digit) and then a bit (tenths or hundredths of an inch, or a fraction - depending which you prefer).
That's ~ 4 digits for each measurement on a common household task.
It's pretty simple doing this as 3245mm on paper .. tradies have been doing this here since the 1970s and nothing's fallen down yet.
Dunno about you, I'm primarily a mathematican doing applied work - but I've worked as a TA (trades assistent) in electrical, gas fitting, plumbing, heavy mechanical, rigging (multi sling heavy lifting), welding, etc. (too much exposure to minesites and cattle stations I guess) and there's an entire class of people that are comfortable working with measurements that span the length of a truck and are accurate to the millimetre (or tenth of an inch) - so, four digits? No worries.
Why do you struggle with that?
You are doing precision work while I'm picturing loosy goosy mental estimations.
Now I am curious as to why not. is it just in that spot where no one really needs a measurement? in the US we went the other way, the yard(the long human scale measurement) is almost never used and the foot(the short human scale measurement is much more common.while in metric land the meter(the yard equivalent) is much more common and the decimeter(the foot equivalent) is never used.
Take the meter, the group setting up the metric system was searching hard for something that was close in size to a yard so they choose 1/10_000_000 the distance from the pole to the equator. nothing wrong with that, but it is not really better than any other arbitrary unit, and with the better defined ways to calculate it(now defined as 1/299792458 of a light second), just as random.
Or celsius, base it on 100 units between the freezing and boiling points of water, not a terrible thing to use, however with the later discovery of absolute zero, they needed a scale that used that, but did not try to redefine the measurement system to include absolute zero, so now you now have this really awkward 273.15... degree difference between the two scales, the nice scale that starts at zero has no other auspicious points to calibrate it at, and the scale with nice points does not start at zero. they could have made their new scale 100 degrees between zero and the freezing point of water, but that would have re jiggered every other derived unit, so understandable that they did not.
Personally I think an si system set up around base twelve would kick ass, what would make it even better would be to replace our base ten number system with a base twelve one, 10 is kind of a poor number in terms of fractions possible. 2 is fine but nobody wants to use 5, things just get awkward when you use 5. nether one is ever going to happen but it is fun to think about our assumptions when it comes to counting and measurement.
The base units are still somewhat arbitrary, in that they are based on this planet: the meter is related to the gradian and the circumference of the Earth. Celsius is based on the freezing and boiling point of water in our atmosphere. Mass is based on a specific volume water.
If we were to set up a system now we could base it on fundamental physical constants (e.g planck or atomic units). But then we would have the same problem that the US currently has: endless arguments about how the old system is so much more 'natural' and convenient than the new one. The fact is that the rest of the world has gone metric, and the US will too, eventually.
But SI has 2 things that the Imperial and US Customary systems do not have:
1. It is coherent: the base units and the derived units relate to each other simply without arbitrary conversion factors. With Imperial and US units you can't even convert between length, area, and volume without them.
2. It is based on powers of 10. There is only one unit for each quantity, and a single system of common multipliers.
> Personally I think an si system set up around base twelve would kick ass
If we had 12 fingers and used base 12 in everyday life, then a measurement system based on multiples of 12 would be awesome. Base 12 is much better than base 10. But we don't.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: profit
4 fingers 3 bones each, there is twelve right there. now use your other hand the same way as the 10's(12 in base 10) digit. now you can count to 100(144 in base 10) on your fingers. see, much better than base a
Babylonian sheepherders did something similar but 12 on one hand and 5 on the other to end up with 60, which is why you see twelve and 60 show up in time measurement.
What makes Imperial units harder to remember than metric units is not that they are related by factors of 2^n 3^m instead of factors of 10^n. It is that the names of different units of the same kind are not predictable based on their ratios.
If you had a system with the same relationships as Imperial, but say all the weight units were of the form <prefix>pound, where <prefix> indicates the multiplier or divider to go from pounds to that derived unit, and the same prefixes were used also used with length units so lengths were all <prefix>yard, Imperial units would be a lot easier than they are now.
The metric vs Imperial debate would then simply be whether factors of 10^n are better or worse than factors of 2^n 3^m.
I find the idea interesting, but it isn't about imperial vs metric, but about a base-(2^n) fantasy metric system vs metric. There is an appeal but of course it will never happen, neither will the imperial-unit world migrate to that nor will the metric world.
The article cites color, center, and aluminum.
Color is essentially etymologically correct - it comes from the Latin word color, by way of France, which did not spell it colour either. And the spelling in English is attested long before Webster. Here's an example from 1657.
https://books.google.com/books?id=xAdmAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA3-PA3&dq...
Here's an example of "center" from 1704: https://books.google.com/books?id=GBcOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA282&dq=c...
And aluminum comes from the British Humphry Davy in 1812, not Webster! This is at least excusable, since aluminum was a newer spelling, as opposed to color and center, which had been in very common use for hundreds of years.
It's very disappointing when journalists get easily verifiable historical facts wrong.
FWIW, America' friendship with France was also rapidly cooling in the 1790s, as the article alludes to. By the Adams administration, it was positively anti-France.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/07/beyond-measure...
So then, either two systems (the worst outcome) or try to switch and your business fails.
Btw its 'simpler' is such a dumb reason - simpler for whom? Why is decimal naturally any better than anything else?
A) It's not shorter, it's longer, according to Wikipedia. B) even if it were, he'd be taller, not shorter.
The fact that the US has dominated while on a totally different is pretty wild
While the American system of measurement often is referred to as the Imperial System, this usage is erroneous.
The US, ever since the formative years of the New World-nation, has used the *US Customary System*.
The Imperial System, alternatively, was established in 1824 for Great Britain and its colonies. Even today, decades after officially switching to SI (metric) units, volume in the UK is measured in British Imperial units.
For further fun, what year did the US Office of Weights and Measures adopt the metric system as the foundation for the Official National System and formally define the US foot in terms of the SI metric length?
The options are to trade in Imperial measurements with the US, or the entire global economy in Metric.
The US can weather that difference given its size both physically and economically
The US doesn't use the Imperial system but it's own customary system. For example, the Imperial pint is about 568 mL, whereas the US customary pint is about 473 mL (liquid pint) or about 551 mL (dry pint). Both are 1/8th of a gallon as defined in each respective system.
(notice how I conveniently included the metric equivalent of both measurements?)
Distances are in meters if they are short, miles if they are long, Leeds will be 275 miles away from your gas station that would charge you by the liter so would be most other liquids unless they are milk or beer, then you’ll get a mixtures of metric pipes with inch threads and inch pipes with metric threads, when you buy a property the land would be demarcated in acres, build up area in square feet and priced in meters squared… and when you over eat because of all the stress of having to memorize 1000 different measurement units your doctor would tell you that you gotta drop a few stones…
I believe they are now technically defined in mm, but obviously it's still based on fractions of an inch. In my view, there aren't any truly compelling reasons to switch from BSP to something based on natural metric measures.
On the other hand, if we were to replace these pipe fittings with metric, we'd end up with a mixed system for realistically at least a century, if not a lot longer due to how long pipe systems last. The complexity (and also, in some cases, danger) of having to maintain both systems for so long would be incredible.
It's similar to how in flying, we still use feet/flight levels, and actually a few places have migrated from metric to the more conventional imperial system.
Imperial pipe fittings are pretty common across the entire world, in fact. I think most countries outside of UK/USA use BSP (often by a different name), but NPT is also sometimes used - and even BSP vs NPT is a huge pain.
So in reality there already is a mixed system which is often what causes a lot of headaches, what’s worse is that BSP is also a mixed standard it has both metric and imperial measurements for its standard threads however when you mix fittings that were machines using metric and pipes that were machined with imperial I’ve found that because of slight tolerance differences you often can get into a point where stacked tolerances becomes and issue.
It hasn't stopped the conversion of most other aviation measurements to metric. Runway dimensions, visibility and separation distances are in meters, temperatures are in Celsius, atmospheric pressure in hectopascals, fuel is in litres, mass is in kilograms. Frequencies are in Hertz. At least that's the case in Australia. Pretty sure Europe is similar.
In short after a lot of math it boils down to the fact that US threads are defined as threads per unit. and metric threads are defined as units per thread. "So what" you may say, "6 of one, half dozen of the other", but threads per unit ends up having a lot of common factors and can be cut easily and swiftly on a lathe with a threading dial, and metric threads can't. Here is a youtube video that explains it better than I can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG9XYDCDwWY
If you ever see someone cutting threads on a lathe and they swiftly engage and disengage the power feed without stopping the lathe, they are cutting US threads on a US lathe. If they have to stop and reverse the lathe, they are using a metric lathe. This has an interesting implication on lathe design, metric lathes tend to be able to stop and reverse much faster than US lathes.
* Road distances are measured in miles.
* Drinks are ordered in pints.
* People measure height in feet/inches and weight in stones.
The problem I have with Celsius is that it’s so clinical. “Man it was sunny day at 23.1” just doesn’t roll off the tongue like say it’s mid seventies today”.
Nobody every talks about the weather in fractions of a degree.
I wonder if that could be part of why Americans don't tend to dislike metric -- we associate it with technical work. Without a forcing function none of use grow up using it in common daily usage, sort of like how emotional words in second languages tend to not be as impactful. They just never match your first language's import.